Choman Hardi (Iraqi Kurdistan)

Choman Hardi was born in Iraqi Kurdistan. Having been forced to move several times, she arrived in the UK in 1993 as a refugee. She studied psychology and philosophy at Oxford and University College London and did her PhD at University of Kent focusing on the effects of forced migration on the lives of Kurdish women from Iraq and Iran. She published poetry in Kurdish before her English collections, Life for Us (2004) and Considering the Women (2015), were published by Bloodaxe. A former chairperson of Exiled Writers Ink! she has organized creative writing workshops for the British Council in UK, Belgium, Czech Republic and India. She was a resident poet for 5 months at Scotland's National Writing Centre in 2004 and was a recipient of a Jerwood / Arvon Young Poet's Apprenticeship. In 2014, she was appointed lecturer in the Department of English and Journalism at the American University of Iraq- Sulaimani (AUIS), a post she still holds. She founded the Center for Gender and Development Studies at AUIS and led the establishment of the first inter-disciplinary gender studies minor in Iraq.